29: Doniece Sandoval
Kena Frank Photography / Courtesy Lava Mae
About Doniece
Doniece Sandoval considers her decades long career to be a tapestry of unique experiences in far flung fields from tech and fashion to sports and the arts. Whether crafting a messaging strategy for a database company, building a brand for a Spanish fashion line, or coordinating engagement for the Olympic Torch Relay, she’s applied her creative lens, ingenuity, and ability to make things happen while leveraging her marketing, branding, and PR expertise to elevate the work.
This is all impressive, but what set her on a path to make a real impact was one sentence: “Welcome to the land of broken dreams.” These were the words uttered by the cabbie taking her through San Francisco’s tenderloin neighborhood one day in early 2013.
As Doniece looked out the window at the many homeless people living on the streets, she realized that none of them, when they were kids, thought that this is where they would end up.
And the problem is massive. Close to 2.5% of San Francisco’s population experienced homelessness in 2022 – that’s close to 20,000 people.
Doniece knew that she had to do something. And soon enough, she knew what that something would be. Shortly after that fateful drive, she encountered a homeless woman on the street. The woman was crying that she would never be clean again, and suddenly, Doniece had a crystal clear understanding of her mission.
She held on to that woman’s feeling of despair and got to work, crowdfunding $75,000 to buy two decommissioned municipal buses and retrofit them as mobile shower and bathroom facilities for the homeless.
And thus, Lava Mae was born and began its mission of ensuring that unhoused doesn’t have to mean unclean. But what Doniece and her team really provided to these marginalized people was dignity – that most basic and critical feeling of being human, being seen, being worthy of respect.
What she probably didn’t realize was the ripple effect her efforts would cause, touching the lives of 45,000 unhoused Californians and inspiring 256 similar programs around the globe. To meet the exploding demand, in 2020, Lava Mae rebranded as LavaMaeX and redefined its mission as a nonprofit accelerator focused on teaching more communities around the world to launch and sustain their own programs. She credits the organization’s marketing/PR prowess for generating international visibility and global demand for its programs that are rooted in Radical Hospitality – a philosophy of treating people with extraordinary care.
Doniece’s awards and honors include becoming an Impact Lab Fellow at the University of Texas Austin, Social Entrepreneur in Residence at Stanford University’s Haas Center, University of San Francisco Honorary Degree recipient, Nonprofit HR’s Women to Watch (2019), 2017 CNN Hero, 2017 James Irvine Foundation Leadership award, CA Assembly Woman of the Year (2017), and the KIND Foundation’s KIND People Award (2016).